The art world was shaken this week by the death of Robert Griffith Hodgins, one of South Africa’s most influential and widely loved artists and art educators. Hodgins died at 4am on Monday March 15 at the Sunninghill Hospital in Johannesburg after his health had deteriorated rapidly following his diagnosis with lung cancer. He was 89 years old and had been looking forward to a large exhibition of his prints to celebrate his 90th birthday in June.
Born in Dulwich, England, in 1920, Hodgins began working at a young age in a London bookstore and then later as a teacher at what he called one of London’s “slum schools”. In his youth he sought shelter in the Tate Gallery because it was warm and dry, and eventually went on to study art at Goldsmiths College.
After emigrating to South Africa in 1938, Hodgins taught painting at the Pretoria Technical College from 1954 to 1962. After a stint as a journalist and art critic with Newsweek, he returned to teaching and held a senior lectureship in the department of fine art at the University of the Witwatersrand from 1966 to 1983. Both institutions have since awarded Hodgins honorary doctorate degrees — the Tshwane University of Technology (formerly Pretoria Technical College) in 2005 and Wits in 2006.
Hodgins maintained his relationship with Wits University and in 2007 donated the Robert Hodgins Print Archive, a collection of at least one of every print he’d ever made, to the Wits Art Museum. In June 2010 the museum will launch a book on Hodgins’s printmaking to celebrate the late artist’s birthday.
It was only in 1983, after retiring from teaching, that his career as a fine artist took off. At the age of 63 he began painting and printmaking full-time and was prolific, producing enough work for a solo exhibition of new material every year until 2009.
Hodgins’s paintings, with their distinctive bold colouring, cartoonish characters and often grotesque handling of the human form, have become a stylistic and technical benchmark for many subsequent painters. In Ivor Powell’s watershed monograph on the artist published in 2002 (Tafelberg), fellow artist Kendell Geers writes of Hodgins: “Very few artists in the world command the respect and admiration of their peers in the way Robert Hodgins does, a reverence often verging on cult status. In South Africa he is the quintessential artist’s artist, a guru for four generations, a point of reference for every self-respecting curator and a voice of reason in the age where video has all but killed the painting star.”
Hodgins remained a passionate artist and an indefatigably jovial character well into old age. In an as-yet unpublished interview with Kathryn Smith conducted in 2009, he told her: “I love the feeling that a little working-class boy with a difficult life, which, when I look back, I don’t know how I even survived with sanity, became me, and loves doing what I love doing, and finds it so exciting and so rich and rewarding.”
He leaves behind scores of admirers and adoring friends, old and young. In a statement for the Mail & Guardian, Fiona Rankin-Smith and Julia Charlton, curators at the Wits Art Museum and long-time friends of the artist, have emphasised the importance of celebrating the life of one who brought much richness to the lives of others.
“He was a giant of the cultural world and had a special bond with young, developing artists. He had the wryest wit and was great both in the kitchen and at the dinner table.”
The Goodman Gallery’s curator, Neil Dundas, said that although the gallery had represented Hodgins since 1984, he had been a friend of the artist for 30 years. “I consider him one of my most important influences and mentors,” Dundas said.
“His energy, intellect and colour have been a great part of life at the Goodman Gallery and I can’t quite imagine a world without him.
“There was a sense in which we all thought Robert was invincible, and I think that to some extent he felt invincible also. He was totally involved in the world and totally possessed of his faculties until his last moments. His passing is the loss of a national treasure.” — Anthea Buys